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Your comments on my education column

My Sunday column is about education and the stimulus bill. I realize that many people don’t believe that education spending belongs there, but to me it’s very hopeful that $100 billion can bolster education during a recession that would otherwise have devastated America’s schools.

I also veer into the research on what works and doesn’t work in education. What strikes me is the evidence that the teacher outweighs everything — you’re much better off with a great teacher in a big class in a bad school than with a poor teacher in a small class in an excellent school. Yet, we invariably reserve the best teachers for the privileged students in suburban schools whose parents are already investing money, time and energy into their kids. The disadvantaged kids in inner city districts who are the neediest get the worst teachers.

I’d particularly welcome thoughts from teachers and principals — particularly those with experience in under-performing schools — about how to improve education. This is a relatively new area of interest to me, and I’m still on the steep part of the learning curve.

I teach at a private school in an urban setting. Our state recently began issuing vouchers for private school for students attending failing schools. There are many failing schools in our school’s neighborhood, and we now have about one-third of our school population arriving from failing schools.

Quality education requires quality teachers. One of the most essential qualities for a good teacher is “withitness.” Also essential are students who are ready to learn. This requires parents who have some basic skills and knowledge of parenting for children from ages 0-3 (and beyond).

Below are the two most significant stories I have come across that provide significant insight into education on these two issues.

the state of education in the us is shameful. 20 percent of americans live below the poverty line as a result. the present economic crisis will only cause poverty in america to grow. only 27 percent of americans ever graduate from college. pornography and drugs are a multi-billion dollar a year businesses in the us.kids and teens spend two hours a week viewing porn on their computers.enrollment of americans, women in particular, in college engineering and medicine programs, and graduation rates, are also very low.

china has already overtaken the us both in the number and quality of engineering and computer science graduates.

before long the us will be second to china in science and technology.

congress may be waking up to this reality by investing more in education. it may be too little and too late. us engineers and scientists are vanishing from the global workplace with us women in particular being a very rare sight.

My dad taught in inner-city public schools for 30+ years. It takes a certain level of commitment, combined with a little luck and the right colleagues. I think we underestimate the importance of team when we look at “great teachers”. A great school is more than just a superstar teacher, in the same way that a great sports franchise cannot be built around a single player (Minnesota Timberwolves, anyone?). Part of the reason the best teachers go to the wealthy districts is because of the commitment level of parents, which is as rewarding as the joy of teaching itself. We need to focus on the parent-teacher relationship as key to the success of the students.

Exactly. One of the ironies of John McCain’s shouting indignantly about “generational theft” (which, BTW, didn’t bother him a whit when it came to humungous tax cuts for the rich or pour money into the unconscionable Iraq War) is that a good chunk of the stimulus bill is going to the generations who will have to pay for it. I do feel sorry that the six-year-olds in my neighborhood will have to pay for the Republicans’ wars & tax cuts & their CEO friends’ bonuses, but I don’t feel bad that they will share the burden of the cost of their improved education, health benefits, infrastructure, etc.

No one really seems to want to talk about the real problems in education. The real problem is socio-economic. You could take kids from a wealthy suburban district and send them to a school falling apart and they would still do well. Same as you could take some less fortunate kids and send them to palace like schools and they would still struggle. The problem is at home. What our kids really need is expectations from parents. They need to know that school is important and they are expected to do well. We can throw all the money in the world at education, but if the most important component, the parents attitudes, aren’t changed it won’t matter.

Love your column on our need for much more, much better priorities for education. But please keep in mind a query Jerry Brown posed on his own becoming governor of California more than 30 years ago.

He asked then, if teaching is the main purpose of education, why is it that administrators get paid so much more than teachers?

Things have only gotten worse since then — because in our corporate scheme of things, specialization matters most, and to get it all bury themselves in mutually isolated departments, by all the corporate conceits of niche, hierarchy, and impersonality.

Of course we could change this. Because we have the Fulbright program at the federal level, we could turn first this lever — that some of our Fulbrighters learn to go abroad not only as specialists again in their niches, but as souls also more literate in making connections to actual humans in actual cultures.

K-12 will follow suit if we start challenging higher ed for this higher, wider, deeper literacy.

Having dspent 35 years in school reform I can only echo your sentiments. We know the HS is broken for all but the best. We know there are numerous fine experiments in K-8 education. And we know the Internet is a potential game-changer in terms of learning on demand, adaptive learning, etc. But you only hint at the biggest problems: there is no model of ‘best practice’ as in medicine that it is mandatory for teachers to know and teacher ed people to teach. The other huge problem is the failure to ensure high-quality lesson, unit, and course designs. That’s where the breakdown occurs: most teachers are still chained to textbooks, and too many admins think the textbook IS the curriculum. Without model courses, model assessments, and better grading and reporting against desired outcomes, there is still no way to influence day to day work that people do alone in their rooms with kids.

You are of course right that the quality of the teacher is everything. But then why not take the natural next step: hold admins. accountable for the gap between teachers since it is both a hiring issue and a supervision issue. But right now it is still the case that teachers work alone instead of as a team charged to achieve results. The recent article in which an entire school faculty is going for National Board Certification is an all-too-rare occurrence where everyone works as a team to close the gaps in practice and results.

Education will not reform itself, any more than the car industry did until Japan threatened our complacency in the 70s. The fact that 340 years later they are still basically clueless is an indication of how long this is going to take in education.

Everyone is looking for a quick fix to the current economic recession but it won’t, can’t, happen. What we need are wise decisions that will impact our future prosperity, rather than an aspirin that only temporarily relieves. Using the stimulus to increase teachers’ salaries or buy more educational resources will only kick schools down in the future. What we need is money used on the quality of training in potential teachers.

As yourself this question: Why do homeschooled children and children from private schools perform so much better than those from public schools, and generally at least cost per student? Gee, maybe free parents know better than the government. The only problem is the poor can’t afford it-they are stuck sending thier children to underperfoming schools with underperforming teachers. When was the last time teachers went on strike for higher perfomance standards for thier charges or for better discipline in schools. No, they only strike for themselves with no concern at all for the children they teach. Think about it.

Having taught for 15 years in the LAUSD, I am sure of a few things: what matters most is not just good teachers, but
excellent principals. And they are much more rare than good teachers. If the principal is not in charge, it all collapses.
Please see the link below to show what happens when there’s no one in charge at a big city school.

However, I’m not sure I would call the stimulus funding a “landmark.” Not much of the dough, as best I can tell, would require anything to be done any differently by the state and local folks in charge of the schools.

Hence, we might very well end up doing what you and I fear — “throwing money at a broken system [that] won’t fix it.”

Much depends on whether Arne Duncan and the committees of jurisdiction in Congress focus on reform and use funding to encourage what works.

This past Thursday I had a lumpectomy at St. John’s Hospital here in Santa Monica, California. Unlike many in our country, I have heath insurance and live in a community where there are many very good doctors. But as anyone knows who goes to the hospital, it is the nursing staff that makes all the difference. The nurses at St. John’s are great. They are some of the best. But if I was an administrator who suddenly doubled their patient load, cut their pay and wasn’t able to keep the equipment that they rely on in proper order and supply, the quality of care would deteriorate and many of those nurses would leave.

I am a high school teacher. I have taught in huge inner city high schools without enough supplies, staff, PTA support, nutritious food for the students, top notch administrators etc.
After four years of dealing with problem students who read at a third grade level and needed to be in a special school where they could get the psychological help and academic remediation they needed, I resigned. I was experiencing stress at such levels that I contracted shingles. I had students who were murdered by gang members. I was being abused on a daily basis by students who took out their anger on me (60% of them were in foster homes). I went to work at a well known charter school.

At the charter I had smaller classes, I had no discipline problems, no verbal abuse. I was happy there even though I was paid at least five thousand dollars less a year and I worked a longer day and a longer school year.

My students test scores were great but the charter never asked me how I did it, they just wanted higher scores the next year. They started creating monthly assessments for my students based on where they thought the students should be in World History. The tests took up time and discouraged the students as most of the time they tested us on things we hadn’t yet covered. My test scores were excellent but they treated me as if I didn’t know what I was doing. I left last year along with HALF of the staff. I couldn’t take the unnecessary pressure.

I’m now working part time in another charter. My room is in a church basement. We have no computers, space, proper desks, on and on. The kids I now have have been in poorly run junior high school charters where there was little rigor or there were forty in a class. I have one student who failed every class in 6th, 7th and 8th grade and was promoted to high school without a hitch. He’s a bright kid but his skills stink as he has done nothing for three years. When students get to high school with 5th grade reading and writing skills, it’s hard to read a 10th grade text and they would prefer not to as they’ve been doing nothing for three years.

Half of new teachers leave in the first year of teaching and another half leave in the first five years. At my present school, several colleagues have already told me that they are leaving the profession. One of them is our Spanish teacher who has a P.h.d in linguistics. He says he can’t afford it anymore. I have the equivalent of a masters in education and a masters in mythology and depth psychology. Yes, teachers like nurses make all the difference. But like those great nurses at St. John’s the conditions of our workplace, the supplies, the quality of administration, the ability to earn a good living and so on directly effect how well we do our jobs.

We need smaller schools. We need students who are not up to grade level to be placed in even smaller classes (not Special Ed) where they can hone the skills they need. No social promotion in junior high school. Parents must be involved. We need funds for after school homework programs and…. We need music, drama, sports, field trips, and P.E. all put back into schools. If you want higher math scores teach every child, starting in first grade, to read music. There is a known correlation between the ability to read music and math scores. If you want critical thinkers you need art, art history, film history, drama. If you want kids to finish high school you’ve got to have enough “carrots” to keep them there. All good private schools do what I have just described. It’s obvious. But as George Bernard Shaw or was it Oscar Wilde that said, “There’s nothing more difficult to prove than the obvious.”

Nicholas, as a professor emeritus of a good university and having been in the teaching profession for over 45 years I most certainly concur with your position of education in this country…and around the world.

However, I also have been affiliated with the medical profession for nearly as long. Please don’t give up on your original priority. Sick children do not learn as well as those that are healthy.

I would put education and health care on equal footing. I believe ( and hope ) that President Obama and this administration will favorably address both.

I retired two years ago after 39 years of teaching. After spending three years as a high school English teacher and one as an elementary teacher mostly to try to learn how to teach reading, I spent five years as a reading teacher( my M.S. is in Developmental Reading) on a hifgh school level. The last thirty years I started, taught and then administrated a literacy program for teenagers and adults.
All my teaching was done in semi-rural or a small city environment.

The thing that changed most in my years in education was the role of the parent. When I began even the most difficult or low achieving student had a parent or family member who kept in contact with the school and was supportive of teachers. By the time I retired this was a rarity even in educated families and families of high achieving students.
This attitude was institutionalized nationally by the No Child Left Behind which places all the responsibility on the schools for a child’s education. Schools are expected to have all children achieve on the same level at the same time no matter the intellectual level, the family background, the condition of the school facitity, or the teaching materials provided.
Leading up to this was almost thirty years of private school advocates, anxious to get public funding, of relentless debunking of and criticizing of public schools in all but the most affluent communites as well as the growing national distaste of taxes for any reason whatsoever.

To my mind this became a self fulfilling prophecy. School were constantly underfunded, facilities deteriorated, all but college orientated programs were devalued, and public school teachers were viewed by too many as enemies rather than as supporters of education.

We therefore have now endorsed a system where we take more and more resources from public schools by citing poor achievement on standardized tests, school attendance , and drop out levels and give it , in many cases privatized schools that are not required to meet the same scores or the same standards as those required of public school or have the same requirements for teachers or administrators..

I certainly aware that there are other factors involved in the deterioration of our public schools nationally but these are the conditions which I feel have helped put us in the situation we are now in.
We need to restablish that parents and communities also have a crucial role in the education of children, that not all children can or should have a strictly academic education, and finally provide enough funding so schools in all communities have some sort of parity in facilities, equipment, materials and quality trained educators.
There certainly many fine schools, school systems and teachers in the country.

I wanted to comment, not because I have anything noteworthy to say, but to thank you. That article rings so true to my mind. I am a teacher of elementary children. Reading your essay was invigorating and inspirational.

The real shame is that we have only a single standard of education; how well can you read and do math. Being a talented musician or artist counts for nothing. Being a talented mechanic counts for even less. We are immersed in the mythology that the only proper goal for a child is a four year liberal arts education heavily laced with science and math. This is nonsense. Think about the last time you needed your leaking roof fixed or your “check engine” light went on.
Although we live in a technoligical society, not everybody needs to know calculus any more than we all need to know how to program computers.
Silly “ons size fits all” national standards simply get in the way and ignore the fact that people are different, have different talents and abilities and different roles to play in society.
Further, children are not empty vessels to be filled with education like soup in a plastic container. Education is an active process in which the student must be a very active participant. The teacher can point the way, but the student must walk the road. The idea that somehow if we could only get “better teachers” the education problems of the inner city would be solved is nonsense! If we put all the students from M.I.T into the City College of New York, we would have M.I.T. in Manhattan. If we put all the students from Bronx Community College into Harvard, we would have Bronx Community College in Boston.
A bit less blame for the teachers and institutions and a bit more responsibility where it belongs; on the students!

America’s national shame is neither health care nor education. It is the family law system which victimizes divorced dads, traumatizes children of broken marriages, and ruthlessly disrupts the lives of wives and children of second marriages.

The system is totally out of control and should become a national topic under the Obama Administration which talks often about the need for fathers to remain active in the lives of their children.

Right now we have system which does nothing but deprive divorced men, first of their right to parent their own children, and then of their finances. Fathers who fall behind in child support payments due to the paralyzed economy are routinely thrown in jail, sometimes for falling behind on payments of just $50. Others are stripped of driver’s licenses and passports which makes it extremely difficult for them to ever find work, and eventually forces them underground. And in at least 2 cases, divorced dads have been killed by government agents (google the names Brian Armstrong and Wilbur Streett).

With millions of divorced dads forced out of their childrens’ lives every day, it’s no surprise that we have a high infant death rate and so many education problems in this country.

With nearly half of all marriages ending in divorce, it would be wise of our government to review its family law policies and bring them to an end. Instead of sole custody, joint custody should be the law of the land. Instead of Draconian measures to collect child support, we should have a system which humanely encourages fathers to spend as much as they wish on their childrens’ health care and education.

The fact that we are not even talking about this is the real national shame.

I am retired after 30 years as a teacher (all levels including one college course) and a librarian, media center director. I entered education at age 35 and my first comment would be that the college education courses should be taught after a probationary period in a classroom. Even so, many of the courses were inferior.

Second: The best assignment I had was at an inner city junior high school which had state-funded demonstration reading and math programs. The reading program was dropped because it lacked cost-effectiveness. Basically, we tested to find out what a child knows, teach him what he doesn’t and then test to find out what he has learned. Children can’t be lumped together in a preconceived curriculum, overcrowded classroom, bringing many levels of knowledge to the experience and then be passed along to the next grade automatically.

As a librarian, I saw all classes with a variety of teachers and I agree, the best teachers had the better achieving students.

I echo what has been said so far regarding school leadership and culture.

This has been my 3rd year teaching and I can’t say I’m very excited about my career. I teach at a low-socioeconomic, high ELL charter school without contracts or union representation and I can’t imagine things getting much worse.

The administration operates with zero transparency and often announces major decisions at the last minute, with zero teacher input. We have all been put in extremely uncomfortable positions, where failure is all but inevitable. Yet as test scores inevitably stay low, we will all look bad.

When I think about what society is asking of those of us in this complex profession, and yet how under-supported and misunderstood we are, I have wonder how much I can really take for the children? Because in the end the difference I can make in their lives is all that gets me through.

I think I can honestly say that while still relatively new to teaching, I know how to teach well – to not only bring students to where they need to be academically but to do so with warmth, humor and passion.

But even when I see teachers out there who are trying their best, but for whatever reason just can’t connect with the kids or get them to achieve, I have to take my hat off to them SIMPLY because they are there, getting up and facing a situation that is literally designed for them to fail.

We’ve all grown up with memories of favorite teachers, and seen the Stand and Delivers and Dead Poet’s Societies. But the reality is that not all of us are these amazingly patient, wise, inspiring, creative super-humans who make it look… not easy, but POSSIBLE.

We’re public school teachers, working public salaries in public schools. We’re not miracle workers.

As a graduate student in the sciences, I was lucky enough to spend a year observing Science instruction at the high school level. I spent a summer going through a series of seminars, sponsored by the school district on various techniques of evaluating students’ progress and learning, and became familiar with the differences between the various types of assessment, and how it should be incorporated into a teacher’s classroom activities.

Unfortunately, it seemed that most of the teachers at these meetings were there only because they were required to. They’d heard the same words year after year, already knew what they were being told, and most of them were already using the techniques they were being lectured on.

On the other hand, I and my fellow graduate students observed incorrect statements coming from the teachers on a regular basis. They were very effectively conveying bad science to their students.

From my experience, the certification process needs to be more stringent in high school, as there were teachers who had great difficulty with simple topics in high school science and weren’t worried about whether or not they would pass their permanent certification exam in their subfield of Science.

Could it be that the pressure due to a lack of applicants in this subject create a downward pressure on the certification process? A “certification inflation” as compared to the complaints of “grade inflation,” if you will?

‘people surmount tragedy when they use themselves up fully, when they use what they have and what they are, whatever they are and wherever they find themselves, even if this requires them to ignore cultural prescription or to behave in innovating ways undefined by their roles. The tragic sense does not derive from feeling that people must always be less than history and culture demand; it derives, rather, from the sense that they have been less than they could have been, that they have needlessly betrayed themselves, needlessly forgone fulfillments that would have injured no one.’

So there you have it. Those would-be teachers are intrinsically motivated bait. Just burn them like you burn fossil fuels. They have no choice and they will not resist.

I entered the field of education after having leaving a previous career. As a non-education major, I was given the opportunity to teach in Florida through my district’s Alternative Certification program. This option allows those of us who have a passion for the profession to attend our own education classes, take the required assessments to prove our understanding of the curriculum we’ll be teaching our students, and learn what teaching is all about. It’s not an easy course, and requires a pretty significant time commitment, all the while teaching in a regular classroom.

I’m one of the success stories; I started as a substitute teacher so I came to an understanding of the qualities one needs to be a teacher by taking over for students regular teachers. If you ever want to test your resolve for entering the teaching profession, try substituting. If you can survive as a substitute and still want to be an educator, you have earned the right!

I’ve heard it said that “it’s easy to be a bad teacher, but very hard to be a good one” and I agree. Every day I go to work is an absolute joy for me! Sure I wish teachers got paid more money, especially considering the amount of responsibility we have, but I wouldn’t trade the satisfaction I get every day for money.

I know I make a difference in the lives of my students. It’s not about the subject I teach; it’s the impact that I can have, to be an agent of change in the lives of my students. My personal goal is to be the best teacher I can be, every hour, of every day, every year.

We’re facing huge budget cuts in Florida this year and my position is far from secure. I can only do my best to educate the students in my care; I’ll let the politicians decide if my efforts are good enough to stay in the profession…..I can only hope, and hope the rest of our country shares the commitment I do. The education of our students is a battle worth fighting, and frankly, one we cannot afford to lose

Kevin Duncan
Orlando, FL

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About Nicholas Kristof

This blog expands on Nicholas Kristof’s twice-weekly columns, sharing thoughts that shape the writing but don’t always make it into the 800-word text. It’s also the place where readers make their voices heard.